The Wall Street Journal-20080212-Business Technology- Hot Farming Tool in India- Cellphones- Tata Hopes to Harvest Profits From Software Used by Rural Planters
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Business Technology: Hot Farming Tool in India: Cellphones; Tata Hopes to Harvest Profits From Software Used by Rural Planters
Full Text (787 words)One day in mid-December, Subhash Arve stood in his grape field outside the village of Boregaon in the Western Indian state of Maharashtra, fretting over whether it was time to spray the first crop of the season with a growth hormone. So he whipped out his mobile phone.
The phone's software, loaded on by Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., prompted him to click various icons and answer questions to indicate what variety of grapes he was growing, when he had pruned his vines and what type of grafts he had used. It also instructed him to take four or five photos with the phone's camera. He then keyed in a code, and, minutes later, the details of his crop and photos of the grapes popped up on a computer screen at the Maharashtra Grape Growers Association in Pune, about 140 miles away.
A reading from a soil-analysis sensor planted in the village by Tata Consultancy and a local weather forecast also appeared on the screen. A scientist at the association answered Mr. Arve via a brief text message: Spray now, and use gibberellic acid, a plant hormone that regulates growth and is tricky to apply. Too little or too much can damage the crop. The scientist recommended an exact amount.
Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy began piloting the cellphone-based crop-advisory service in Mr. Arve's village in October. The information-technology consulting arm of the Tata Group hopes the project will spearhead its push into rural markets.
But this project is about far more: The mobile phone is now one of the hottest development tools world-wide. Nongovernmental organizations see cellphones as a way to bolster incomes of the world's poor, while corporations eyeing untapped markets hope new mobile services can boost rural incomes and corporate revenue at the same time. South Asia, where mobile use is rapidly growing, has become a test bed.
Reuters Group PLC is piloting a service in India providing information on crop prices in local markets to farmers, helping them decide to which market in their area they should take their produce on any given day to get the best price. That service, which was offered free to farmers in a few regions in Maharashtra under a pilot program last year, was rolled out statewide in October as a commercial service. Reuters is looking for telecommunications partners to take the service India-wide next year.
In one of the earliest efforts to recognize the cellphone's potential, Grameen Bank, the Bangladesh-based pioneer of microcredit in remote regions, and Grameen Foundation, a separate entity in New York, have helped introduce "village phone" programs in 10 countries, setting up 300,000 women in tiny villages with mobile phones that each woman rents on a per-call basis to her neighbors.
"Mobile phones are a pretty important tool for development. I'd put it up there, just behind education and public health, in the importance to economic growth," says Leonard Waverman, a professor of economics at London Business School who has studied the impact of telecommunications on economic growth and productivity.
Although as few as 4% to 5% of rural Indians have cellphones, about 50% of new customers are expected to come from rural areas over the next two to three years, according to estimates from Bharti Airtel Ltd. in India. The expanding number of phones helps raise rural incomes in some simple ways. It makes carpenters, weavers and plumbers more reachable by their customers, and it gives better information to farmers and fishermen about where to sell their harvests.
Specialized software and information services, like the one that Tata Consultancy is piloting, add momentum to the development trend. The company hopes its service will address a host of problems faced by rural farmers. Not only do many have to guess which market is best for selling their crops, they struggle to use modern fertilizers and pesticides. Many are illiterate so they can't read instructions.
The consulting firm has designed its software to use icons and simple instructions in local dialects to get around the literacy problem. Besides connecting farmers with local crop experts at government research institutions and universities, Tata Consultancy plans to offer other information, like daily crop prices from local markets, transit schedules, and regional job postings.
"If we are able to create meaningful applications for the Indian farmer, the potential is huge," says K. Ananth Krishnan, Tata Consultancy's chief technology officer. There are more than 200 million people in India who work in the agricultural sector, and are underserved by mobile companies, he says.
The price of the handsets also must be kept low, no small feat. The phone designs must protect electronic components from the heat. Tata Consultancy is considering co-branding the phones with companies that want to advertise to farmers.
